The Promise of American Life eBook

other hand, may learn from experience that the principle
of equal rights is a dangerous weapon in the hands
of factious and merely revolutionary agitators, and
even that such a principle is only a partial and poverty-stricken
statement of the purpose of a democratic polity.
The logic of its purposes will compel it to favor
the principle of responsible representative government,
and it will seek to forge institutions which will
endow responsible political government with renewed
life. Above all, it may discover that the attempt
to unite the Hamiltonian principle of national political
responsibility and efficiency with a frank democratic
purpose will give a new meaning to the Hamiltonian
system of political ideas and a new power to democracy.

III

WILLIAM J. BRYAN AS A REFORMER

One would hardly dare to assert that such a future
for the reforming agitation is already prophesied
by the history of reform; but the divergence between
different classes of the reformers is certainly widening,
and some such alignment can already be distinguished.
Hitherto I have been classing reformers together and
have been occupied in pointing out the merits and
failings which they possess in common. Such a
method of treatment hardly does justice to the significance
of their mutual disagreements, or to the individual
value of their several personalities and points of
view. In many instances their disagreements are
meaningless, and are not the result of any genuine
conviction; but in other instances they do represent
a relevant and significant conflict of ideas.
It remains to be seen, consequently, what can be made
out of their differences of opinion and policy, and
whether they point in the direction of a gradual transformation
of the agitation for reform. For this purpose
I shall select a number of leading reformers whose
work has been most important, and whose individual
opinions are most significant, and seek some sort
of an appraisal both of the comparative value of their
work and of the promise of their characteristic ideas.
The men who naturally suggest themselves for this
purpose are William J. Bryan, William Travers Jerome,
William Randolph Hearst, and Theodore Roosevelt.
Each of these gentlemen throughout his public life
has consistently stood for reform of one kind or another;
and together they include almost every popular brand
or phase thereof. Reform as a practical agitation
is pretty well exhausted by the points of view of these
four gentlemen. They exhibit its weakness and
its strength, its illusions and its good intentions,
its dangerous and its salutary tendencies.